Guardians of the Volcanoes |Virunga, Rwanda

The mountain gorillas of the Virunga Massif live within a surprisingly narrow band of forest draped across the volcanic slopes. Inside the canopy, the world feels expansive - a realm of shifting mist and ancient vegetation. Yet the illusion ends abruptly. Beyond the last fringe of bamboo, farmland rises almost to the forest line, each terrace carved from soil whose fertility leaves little room for anything to remain untouched.

Against that pressure, the gorillas have become a rare conservation success. Their numbers are slowly increasing, a testament to decades of protection and the daily work of people whose lives are tied, directly or indirectly, to this habitat. Even so, the space they occupy remains finite, pressed up against communities for whom the land is both livelihood and legacy. Two forms of survival run in parallel here - one rooted in the forest, the other in the cultivated slopes - each shaped by a landscape that must stretch further than it physically can.

Spending time in this environment, you begin to see how interdependent these lives are; how the persistence of one species rests, however delicately, on the choices and pressures shaping the other. And it leaves a question that lingers long after you’ve walked out of the mist: when every inch of land is spoken for, what does it truly mean to share it?